What do Frankenstein and many vivid early nineteenth-century artworks, including paintings by J.M.W. Turner, have in common? Supposedly, that would be the 1815 eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora and its climactic repercussions.

Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, died of childbed fever just ten days after giving birth to Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. (Let’s all take a moment to give thanks for germ theory and widely available birth control.) They overlapped in life only briefly, but Wollstonecraft…

Haifaa Al-Mansour, director of the critically acclaimed Wadjda, is set to direct a Mary Shelley biopic entitled A Storm in the Stars—and it will star Elle Fanning as Shelley. The film, written by Emma Jensen, explores the "problematic romance" between English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary (nee…

With Halloween is almost upon us, every major paper is running stories on haunted houses, scary movies, pop culture-inspired costumes and... horror fiction. One of the more interesting pieces, from Sunday's New York Times, concerns the role of female authors in the horror genre. After naming Mary Shelley as the…